“If Trump intentionally blows up the Iran deal—as he by all accounts would like to do—Kim will be loath to enter into any negotiations with us, not trusting that any commitments would be honored by the United States.”

Almost two decades of complete bi-partisan policy failure — we sign the papers and deliver the goods, the Norks pocket and cheat advancing their ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs to the point where they could now threaten us with a nuclear strike on the West Coast, and we should be worrying if we could be credible enough to Kim to induce him to yet another deal?

This mindset fits the definition of insanity to a T.

“Iran and North Korea are both long-term security challenges that will vex American policymakers for many years to come.”

How can you know that we’d have “many years to come” if we continue on with the same failed policies? Obama called it “strategic patience” when, in fact, it was deliberate strategic impotence of the head-in-the-sand kind, and here we are, with Kim’s missiles now flying over Japan and his ever more powerful nuclear tests.

D4x

Keeley cites Reuters in giving France’s Macron credit for suggesting “a way forward” that Keeley believes, by citing the NYT & TAI’s previous misconceptions et al, that President Trump will not see without Macron’s lead.

“…on Iran, we are taking a comprehensive approach to the range of Iran activities — its threat network, its ballistic missile systems,
its nuclear program. And that is something which I think is very much needed after the Iran deal.

I think the Iran deal [JCPOA] became a proxy for an Iran policy, and we are trying to take
a comprehensive approach and bringing in all of Iran’s activities — terrorism, nukes, missiles, regional instability — so that we’re not substituting the Iran deal for an Iran policy.

And one of the things that’s common to both the meetings with the French and the Israelis is this deep and abiding concern about Iran’s activities in Syria, and broadly — whether it’s in Yemen or Syria, Iraq,Lebanon.

Anyone reading this might be aware of the many credible reports that North Korea (DPRK) is the primary supplier and workforce for nuclear technology and ballistic missiles to Iran, and Syria, and Hezbollah. Iran pays the North Koreans, somehow.

I admit that Trump’s Sept. 21 Executive Order signed Sept. 20, 2017 was hard to follow. My main take-away is that any person, bank, ship, airplane, helicopter, truck, bicyclist, donkey, who has any transaction with North Korea, the nation-state or any of it’s citizens, is a violator.

WARNING: Never google image ‘North Korea dogs’ NEVER.

Fat_Man

Kim and Iran could trust the US commitments if they were embodied in treaties ratified by the Senate. Of course constituional niceties are often lost on dictators and tyrants and on the staff at TAI.

Y.K.

The American Interest forgets the elephant in the room – Libya. You know, the campaign which TAI supported when it was happening? The campaign done by President Obama against an autocrat which actually signed a strong deal and implemented it? Simply put, after Libya there’s no chance of NK doing a disarmament deal because Un sees the US will interfere directly when it can. The only possible deal in NK post-Libya is a freeze deal, and fate of Iran Deal has no bearing upon that, since Un will keep more than enough nukes in a NK freeze deal to keep US out.

P.S. Note that what TAI suggests would also be seen as a violation of the Deal by Iran (with good reason – they wanted to remove sanctions and now you’re reintroducing them), so we end up with either make-believe sanctions or the same result of tearing up the deal…

markterribile

Bear in mind that Iran and North Korea have almost certainly been trading technology. And while a successful and damaging action against one might drive the other to more desperate action, it might also lead it to caution. This game mixes chess, poker, and Go.

Angel Martin

“Many foreign policy failures are born from failing to anticipate how actions in one theater can reverberate in another.”

No. The most destructive foreign policy failures have come from weakly giving in to the bluffs and threats of tyrants and dictators.

One of the strongest lessons we get from the archives of the collapsed anti-Western dictators is how much they feared the democracies would stand up to them. True for the Nazis. True for the USSR and its allies.

Instead the weak leaders of the democracies “negotiated” a “diplomatic solution” to “avoid” war. And these pathetic leaders also signed one-sided “treaties” that were always broken by the other side.

As a result we got WW2. And a 45 year Cold War which we were lucky to win.

And we will get something much worse than WW2 from a nuclear armed NKorea and Iran. Especially as they are fronting for Russia and China.

Thursday, September 21, 2017 4:37 P.M. EDT, less than twenty-four hours before Keeley posted his indictment, in a Press Briefing by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, in twenty-two minutes, after a recap of the 72nd UNGA, Haley answered nineteen (19) Questions

“Q&A: Iran: HALEY: “But the Iran Deal and U.S. law are two different things.

Q: Are you saying that he could decertify without specifically withdrawing from the deal?
AMBASSADOR HALEY: That’s right. I mean, that’s just the option that he has and
that’s the Corker-Cardin law that came into effect that allowed that to happen.”
[UNSC Res] 2331, the resolution that was in place, what we saw was it basically wrapped in with the nuclear deal; it
said if Iran did any of these things, it would be in violation. And since then, the Secretary General has
come out with a report that said they have violated all of those things —
their support for terrorism, their arms smuggling, the idea that they continue
to do ballistic missile testing — and they need to be called out for that.”

[Three Q&A on Burma, and two Q&A on Iran later] …

HALEY: “you look at North Korea and you look at the fact that for 25 years we were looking at bad deal after bad deal after bad deal,
and broken promise, broken promise, broken promise.

So here we are again, and we don’t want to be dealing with the next North Korea. And so that’s why he’s
taking it so seriously and saying we need to look at every aspect of this and
make sure that it truly is in the best interest of the American public.” “What I will tell you is, a lot of
countries are going to have their opinions on whether the U.S. should stay in
the deal or not. But those countries don’t have Iranians saying “death to America.” They’re not saying “death to Germany.” They’re not
saying all of those things. What we can see is terrorist attacks happening
everywhere with ties to Iran. And that’s something we need to be careful about.
And so it has never moved the U.S. to care about what other countries say. What
does move the President is, are we doing everything in the best interest —
security interest for the American people.

In terms of comparing Iran to North Korea, that’s exactly what we’re
doing, is we had so many bad deals with North Korea and everybody looked the
other way. And every time they broke that deal, they looked the other way.
Well, where are we now? They now have a hydrogen bomb. They now have ICBM. So
if we don’t do something and we make the same mistakes we made with North
Korea, we will be dealing with Iran that has nuclear weapons and ballistic
missile technology. And so that’s the concern and that’s what we’re trying to
do with that.” …

September 20, 2017:https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/20/remarks-vice-president-un-security-council 11:16 am Peacekeeping;
THIS is the most under-reported fifteen minute ‘speech’ of the entire 72nd UNGA four-day whirlwind. VP Pence introduced the unanimous UNSC vote for UN peacekeeping reform, but Pence’s speech also tied in with POTUS’ speech on Sept. 19, context with UN’s original mission “to maintain international peace”, added Human Rights Council reform, hit Radical Islamic terrorism, Iran, North Korea; expanded on Venezuela, and included Myanmar aka Burma.

Twenty-four speakers. The meeting began at 10:07 a.m. and ended at 1:33 p.m.
Complete transcript of UNSC meeting: “Security Council Reaffirms Primary Role of States in Preventing Conflict, Unanimously Adopting Resolution 2378 (2017) on Peacekeeping Reform”https://www.un.org/press/en/2017/sc12996.doc.htm

Of course, the most MIS-reported story of the year is that TeamTrump is too inexperienced to know what they are doing in foreign
relations…Trump is very good at personal diplomacy, and his team knows how to strategically plan, and execute the plan.

I just wanted to see if the announced bilaterals, etc, had stuck to the plan that NSA McMaster announced on September 15.
Yes, they did. What started out as a simple schedule check turned into a graduate seminar in international relations.

The American embarrassment is that the still-employed pundits, analysts, and almost every journalist are blind, deaf, and dumb.

[Copied from my notes, where I see the complete URL descriptor. Anyone with a smidgeon of curiosity can see if it was a bilateral, speech, presser, or whatnot.]